I fall in love with Pixel Art every time I see or try it

First game, no prior experience. Created with Gdevelop and Piskel. Harvest the crops before they run off your plot. Still a lot to do..

I think you can try it at https://liluo.io/instant-builds/8a45517b-dfb8-41ba-ba15-ae64337b1186

As I told earlier that day "7 days to harvest" is a game about a common man convicted to harvest fields for his antisocial behavior.

So we made our 1st level and most part of core mechanics. Our artist made amazing job making all that pretty and dark assets for a whole day. Our programmer is still working on mechanics btw so you can send him your support in comments, I am pretty sure he will be pleased.

On day two we will finish core mechanics and will make every level of our game with their features. And maybe we will have some progress on a dialogue system (which you can see on this brand new screenshot I brought you).

So I guess we will be back tomorrow with fresh updates on our work. Stay tuned.

Need music for your game? I am now giving away MuGen ABSOLUTELY FREE to LDJAM participants!

Get your copy here: https://kodingnights.itch.io/a977q3y663 - and did i mention it was FREE? (Normal price $19.99)

So go ahead and get your copy NOW!

As per usual I've started the compo late. But hey, a few hours in and I have mapping and movement done with some sprites.

Now to add some fire. (Like, literal fire, this mushroom dungeon harvest won't be a walk in the park for Mimi.)

My day one progress. Tried to do timed asset (30min per model) and most of them are not complete but at least i can spend some time on other things.

I'll spend some time on the gameplay for the next hours. Tommorow : lighting and audio mainly.

I was confident yesterday but today passed in a blink of an eye.

Me and @Pegasys spent today implementing most of the gameplay mechanics. We plan on adding farming related bosses tomorrow and a farmers shop. Hopefully replacing some of these placeholder assets with final art aswell.

Good evening everyone (yes it's 10:30 pm around here).

I finally finished implementing the basics of all the features I wanted. So I still have some time to make it even more fun to play.

The first step will be to draw a real map for the game with many items to collect (there is manyyyyy to implement).

Then will come the spawn of the enemies, the sound effects, the music (and maybe some menus ?)

I really hope that everything will look good, but in any case I'm having a lot of fun!

My aim was to do this in the spirit of the old Ludum Dares — i.e., get a game done in 24 hours. Thanks to the fast work of @bcav and @genie we were able to do it this time (albeit including an extra hour for submission and final adjustments).

* Friday 5:00 pm: *

By this time I had an idea in place. It was an old idea I had from years ago, after designing the smash hit, Gretchen’s Head (LD 42). In its essence the game would have an old tree in a dark woods with the heads of several children — presumably Gretchen’s offspring — attached to the ends of the branches. It was going to look something like this:

I worked until midnight. I had high hopes for it, as I’ve been toying with this idea on and off for quite some time. I got the skeleton code and some graphics in place, but I wasn’t very close to a finished product.

Saturday 3:30 am:

My alarm went off. My plan was to get up around this time, or maybe 4:00, but I went back to sleep.

Saturday 6:58 am:

This is when I got up. I had breakfast and worked further on the game. I kept thinking: what if I got rid of the tree and allowed the player to move around the screen? The problem with the tree was that it couldn’t move. All you could do was open a mouth on a child’s head and eat a growing heart. That could have been turned into a game but I lost all inspiration for it. Part of the problem is that @genie would have to draw several heads, and with a 3:00 pm deadline, I doubt she wanted to do that. Aside from that, the game was too static. It occurred to me that maybe a single protagonist that the player could move around would be a better idea.

Saturday 10:00 am:

By this time I had the skeleton of the new game in place. Fortunately some of last night’s code was still usable.

Saturday 1:00 - 2:00 pm:

By this time lunch was done and I was 100% into coding and design. Also, @genie and I had decided on the look of the protagonist — as usual, she would be a derivative of Alice, Lewis Carroll’s beloved angel. Surprisingly it didn’t take long to animate the drawing that @genie sent me. Sound effects were quickly added using https://sfxr.me/ — an old mainstay if there ever was one. Yes, I know, the sound effects in this game aren’t the best in the world, but they do add a little spice, I like to think.

Saturday 2:00 - 3:00 pm:

Mainly I spent this time play-testing. I wish I had more time for this, but I was able to iron out all the major bugs (I hope). I am confident that the game is beatable, but not too difficult and not too easy. We’ll see — you folks will be the judges.

Saturday 3:00-4:00 pm:

Submission hour. Yeah, if we include this, it took us 25 hours — still, close enough. No major changes here, except for adding a final music track that @bcav sent me. Mainly I made minor adjustments — e.g., I added in-game instructions, a game title, and so forth.

* Lessons Learned: *

1. Sometimes doing a major re-design is a good idea, even when very little time is left. Last night’s idea — I’m glad I ditched it. In hindsight, it seems too lackluster. The one we finished today has a certain aura to it, and it’s good to see Alice again.

2. It was a lot more fun with only 24 hours to finish a game. In the past, Ludum Dare weekends really dragged. I squandered the time trying out too many ideas and often waited until the last day before I dug in.

3. In the final hours, @bcav suggested an extension but fortunately he pulled through. Oddly enough, his music is just as good this time, if not better — a shorter time-frame seems to have helped us.

Enemies now have internal state machines with a placeholder sine wave movement, take damage, and drop souls for harvesting.

We are happy to join this edition! Though we didn't expect the Jam to start this early in the year, so we didn't get the time to organize properly. 

We are using Unity, and most probably pixel art as shown in the early WIP screenshot.

First thing first, we have to implement some of vampire survivors mechanics, and only be able to introduce our twist tomorrow as it is already 9pm here.

Have fun.

It's a bit of a tradition of mine to search the theme into Spotify and play whatever albums I find. This time it seems like "Harvest" is a popular topic among both Americana/southern rock and extreme metal lol

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is feature-complete. A few code touches left and one feature left to implement to make it usable. Got a stretch goal, but tomorrow I'll focus mainly on aesthetics, music and adding content.

State of the game as of now

With a little less than 24 hours to go, I have a barebones prototype. First thing tomorrow I'll be running around my house with a Tascam for some sound effects.

(P.S. I hope pre-made lens flare effects don't fall afoul of the "make everything yourself" rule...)

Working on our game... Procreate and Photoshop to the rescue! It has no name right now, and i am still drawing all of the animations, so we shall see how it ends up. Excited to see everyone's quirky art!

Level is a little barren, but all the mechanics are in and working.